INSIDER'SACCESS

This Russian Restaurant Is Shamelessly Serving Rat Burgers

Travis Ketzak

Dec 04, 2016

It's always a huge deal when rat meat is found at a US restaurant. Hell, bad publicity like that has even closed a few places down. So imagine our surprise when we discovered Moscow's Krasnodar Bistro is actually (and quite shamelessly) serving rat meat. Yes, on purpose.

Krasnodar’s chef, Takhir Kholikberdiev, is turning the rats into various food forms, like burgers, hot dogs, and fried dumplings. Slightly different from the American rats we're used to, Russian nutrias are a giant orange-toothed rodent also known as coypu or river rat, and found in southern Russia. They're a bigger form of the species that look a little like giant guinea pigs, and they actually make for some relatively lean meat that's high in nutrition, particularly omega-3 fatty acids.

Adding even more incentive, nutrias multiply like rabbits, making them a relatively easy and cheap meat to harvest. That makes for a lot of burgers, hot dogs, and dumplings... and surprisingly, people are gobbling it up at insane speeds. Yeah, apparently it's totally delicious. Maybe the US has something they can learn from this after all... rat sandwich, anyone?